The sound track is a mess. Ray Bolger walks into view done up in full Scarecrow costume. As a child, Sylvia’s favorite of the three traveling companions was Bolger and at the end of the movie, when Dorothy tells him she’s going to miss him the most, Sylvia instantly wanted her to stay in Oz. Forget Auntie Em. Forget Kansas. And now, watching the Scarecrow lean over and whisper in Garland’s ear, making her laugh with some secret no one will ever know, she feels Dorothy’s making a huge mistake all over again. You can’t go home again, girlfriend. So bag the thought of a dicey balloon trip with the faux wizard. And forget the heel-clicking mantra of Glinda, the little overachieving cheerleader. Hit the road with the Scarecrow and go assume the mortgage on the Witch’s castle. You can train those flying monkeys to keep house and do the cooking. And you and strawboy can head out every night, dance and get weird in the deepest part of that haunted forest.
There’s an awkward cut and the film goes dark for a second and when the light comes back, the Scarecrow is up on his post at the fork in the yellow brick road. His voice gives Dorothy confusing directions a few seconds after his hands point down the proposed path she should walk. It’s unsettling watching this — the images mimic, almost perfectly, the images that Sylvia’s known from this film most of her life. But almost is a crucial word. There’s something just a hair off at all times, something that doesn’t exactly line up. Something beyond the out-of-sync sound track.
Sylvia has watched this movie at least once a year since she was five or six years old. More, once it was released on video. That means she’s seen it over twenty-five times, enough to have the nuances, the inflections of voice, the exact manner of movements, down to a reflexive memory. It’s akin to that instinctual, really helpless way you know a pop song note for note after you’ve heard it a hundred times. You sing along in your head and you know, without thinking, without even being aware that you know, when the singer’s voice is going to alter, to drop or rise or quiver. It’s a buried surety, a certainty that’s grown so innate it’s like breathing air.
And now, watching Bolger and Garland, Scarecrow and Dorothy, play out movements that almost match up to what she knows should be happening, but don’t quite, it’s akin to hyperventilating. It’s an awful confusion. Because she can’t even identify what’s wrong. She just knows something is off. Scarecrow’s arm might move an inch beyond the length it extended in the standard version of the movie. Dorothy’s voice might rise just a bit higher. The choreography is the same. The words are the same. But their presentation is just a millimeter away from what she’s come to memorize. And as the differences continue between what she sees each moment and what she expects to see, she begins to feel a kind of vertigo, a dizziness, a sense of displacement, an apprehension that the whole world has just slipped out of a balance that she thought was inviolable. If the Scarecrow can act in a different way than he’s always acted, then science and religion are destroyed. Then anything can happen to her life.
And yet she can’t take her eyes off the screen. She watches as Dorothy bends the nail that has trapped the Scarecrow on his post in the cornfield for an eternity. She watches as the Scarecrow slides to the ground, tries to stand on rubbery legs, slides into “If I Only Had a Brain.”
She stares at the screen as Dorothy tells him her hopes for salvation in the Emerald City. And she focuses in tight as these two innocents join forces and break into this skipping promenade down their chosen pathway while reprising “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”
It’s possible that some offscreen voice, maybe even Victor Fleming’s, calls, “Cut,” but Sylvia doesn’t hear it. She knows for certain that the next scene should be the bullying apple trees. But Garland and Bolger are still in front of the cornfield. The music crashes into this dissonant confusion for a second or two, then returns in another form, something far removed from the light innocence of “If I Only Had a Brain.” Now they’re hearing a king of jazzy swing, but there’s no way to tell is this is part of the original sound track or was dubbed in at some later date. The music seems to fit the movements of the two figures on the screen, but it deviates enough for doubt.
The Scarecrow has taken Dorothy’s hand and is whirling her in and out of his arms, spinning her outward and retracting her into his straw-stuffed chest like a yo-yo. He catches her in an aggressive embrace and they start a polka-ish hoedown trot, circling around the perimeter of the yellow-brick dance area. Clearly, the film has broken free of any connection to the images of Sylvia’s memory. It’s a brand new world now, a place where she has no idea what’s coming. And she likes it a lot better. The vertigo, the inconsistency between what should be and what is, has vanished and all she wants to do is watch.
She gets a good look at Dorothy’s face as the screen dancers loop by their closest point to the camera. The girl from Kansas is howling, loving this moment, seemingly set free and basking in the spontaneity, the unscripted abandon of the Scarecrow’s improvisation. Here, in this moment of deviation, there’s no worry about budget or time schedules. There’s no fat-faced studio boss hollering about gained weight or contract clauses. There’s only the Scarecrow’s flying, steering arms and their intermingled, convulsing laughter.
They mutate their form into a tango, pivot at the far point from the lens and stomp back, cheek to cheek. Dorothy’s eyes closed up with laughter, until they’re grotesquely close to the screen and someone yells, “watch the camera” over the music. Scarecrow does a slapstick pratfall as if tripping over some unseen equipment and laughter erupts everywhere. He pretends to drop unconscious on the bricks and Dorothy stands over him for a minute, arms across her stomach, then hand up to her mouth to cover the uncontrollable laughter. With her back to the camera she steps over him, straddles the prone straw body and bends down, the pleats of the farm dress spreading across her rear. She begins to help the recovering Scarecrow up and he suddenly springs back to full-bodied life, bounds to his feet, sweeps Dorothy into the air. She lets her head fall back, her hair swinging in the rush, new waves of hilarity playing over her mouth.
Then Scarecrow goes into her neck, his floppy hat sailing away to the ground, a vampire-like flourish to his maneuver. The offscreen noise turns to hoots and whistles and the music shuts down. But a curious thing occurs, totally unexpected from the context of everything that’s led to this moment. Dorothy’s arms, limp in the air behind her one second, swing up and forward and wrap themselves around Scarecrow’s neck. And the strawman’s lips move and find the farm girl’s. And suddenly, instantly, in one bolt of adrenal fluid and muscular expansion, startling as the change from black-and-white to color, the playacting is over.
Sylvia is removed from the image before her by over half a century. But she’s absolutely certain that a change has taken place. The Scarecrow and Dorothy are French-kissing and the joker running the camera pulls in for a tight close-up and there’s a shocked electricity that passes from the now probably dead movie crew through the screen and into the Ballard Theatre and into Propp and Sylvia. The unmistakable charge of sexuality has exploded unexpectedly between the eternally virginal Kansas schoolgirl and the man made of straw and cloth. Mouth on mouth and eyes closed, their heads twist and the audience of two can feel the warmth that has to be expanding beneath the skin of the actors, inside their legs and stomachs, making their breath come faster and harder. And in that moment, Sylvia lets herself act without thought or preparation, totally and completely on instinct and impulse. She reaches down and puts her hand on Propp’s leg.